The recent AI breach gathering all the media attention was a display of how sophisticated technology can act without human supervision. The AI implementation involved did exactly what it was programmed to do and did it very well.
It did it so well that it brought up the question of AI exhibiting human-level intellectual behaviors, or perhaps even consciousness. Security experts and AI experts are in clear agreement that AI did nothing more than, as I have said, very efficient and maximized execution of computer programs.
Even with this being the case, it still keeps the question on the table. Will AI ever reach human-level consciousness? Become self-aware, or even maniacal? All of those questions lead to the most important one: Is human-level consciousness the end goal of AI?
Many science fiction stories use machine consciousness as a major theme, perhaps the most famous one being HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
The greatest irony of all is that we are considering human consciousness as a potential attribute of machines when scientists don’t understand human consciousness in the first place. Scientists still can’t explain how physical, observable processes in the brain can generate the subjective experience of consciousness.
Until we can do just that, consciousness will continue to be a human biological process, and machines will continue to exhibit programmatic optimization.
